Friday, November 22, 2013

The Demonetization: Ending the Cult of the Commodity site has been created by a very active member of the demonetisation movement Kellia Ramares-Watson.
Earlier this year Kellia interviewed me on our Life Without Money book. Earlier this month Kellia put a transcript of the interview up on her site. Here’s a quote from it:

I would say that nonmarket socialism is a money-free, state-free,
class-free society where peopleʼs needs are still met. And theyʼre met by people sharing in decision-making and sharing and doing all of
the work of production and exchange. So you just cut out there being the
principle of money and monetary flows in exchanges. And you also cut out there
being big bureaucracies so that we all have representatives who have representatives,
and the kinds of communist experiments in the 20th century of China, Russia and
Cuba, which were all highly state-organized communism. Nonmarket socialists see
it being highly problematic to have the state. We see the state as being an
important part of capitalism. The state as we know it today, it has actually
grown along with capitalism. Itʼs sort of a way of limiting it; itʼs a way of actually supporting it; and itʼs also a way of ameliorating it. So it has very complex kinds of
functions. But we think that in order for people to have their basic needs met,
it would make more sense if people themselves were making a lot more decisions
about what they needed and how it was produced and doing it themselves.

You can read a transcript
of the interview — and leave your own comment — here:

... we rage against the rule of money. Not against money itself,
necessarily, because in the present society we need money to live. We
rage rather against the rule of money, against a society in which money
dominates. Money is a great bulldozer tearing up the world. It is an
insidious force penetrating ever more aspects of our lives. Money holds
society together, but it does so in a way that tears it apart.